I Spit on Your Grave
USA, 1978, 35mm, 1.85, colour, 101′
16.4. | 00:00 | Slovenian Cinematheque
directed and written by Meir Zarchi cinematography Nouri Haviv editing Meir Zarchi, Spiro Carras cast Camille Keaton, Eron Tabor, Richard Pace, Anthony Nichols, Gunter Kleemann
A budding New York writer Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton, supposedly Buster’s great-niece) retires to a quiet cabin in the woods to work on her first novel. Stalked by a foursome of local men, she is brutally raped and left naked, humiliated and half-dead on the ground of her forest abode. But Jennifer survives to stage one of the most infamous, sadistic and incredibly skilful vengeances to be seen on film. Her day has come, or as per the original film title: it’s the Day of the Woman.
This notorious cult classic, synonymous with the “rape and revenge” subgenre, is surely one of the most controversial films of all time. Because of its alleged “glorification of violence against women” the film was condemned, banned and endlessly cut by censors the world over, only to be redeemed by critics and academia alike as a “misunderstood feminist film”. After a number of dubious sequels and remakes, director Meir Zarchi and his star Camille Keaton finally return to the crime scene, and are currently completing the formal sequel I Spit on Your Grave: Deja Vu.
“A vile bag of garbage named I Spit on Your Grave is playing in Chicago theaters this week. It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it’s playing in respectable theaters, such as Plitt’s United Artists. But it is. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life.”
– Roger Ebert, 16th July 1980, Chicago Sun-Times
“Angry displays of force may belong to the male, but crying, cowering, screaming, fainting, trembling, begging for mercy belong to the female. Abject terror, in short, is gendered feminine, and the more concerned a given film is with that condition—and it is the essence of modem horror—the more likely the femaleness of the victim. It is no accident that male victims in slasher films are killed swiftly or offscreen, and that prolonged struggles, in which the victim has time to contemplate her imminent destruction, inevitably figure females. Only when one encounters the rare expression of abject terror on the part of a male (as in I Spit on Your Grave) does one apprehend the full extent of the cinematic double standard in such matters.
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Ironically, it may be the feminist account of rape in the last two decades that has both authorized a film like I Spit on Your Grave and shaped its politics. The redefinition of rape as an offense on a par with murder, together with the well-publicized testimonials on the part of terrified and angry victims, must be centrally responsible for lodging rape as a crime deserving of the level of punishment on which revenge narratives are predicated. (After all, I Spit on Your Grave is nothing more or less than a dramatization of the ‘castrate rapists’ slogan of the seventies.)
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An enormous proportion of horror takes as its starting point the visit or move of (sub)urban people to the country. … That situation, of course, rests squarely on what may be a universal archetype. Going from city to country in horror film is in any case very much like going from village to deep, dark forest in traditional fairy tales. Consider Little Red Riding Hood, who strikes off into the wilderness only to be captured and eaten by a wolf (whom she foolishly trusts), though she is finally saved by a passing woodsman. Multiply and humanize the wolf, read ‘rape’ for ‘eat,’ skip the woodsman (let Red save herself), and you have I Spit on Your Grave. (Nor is the woodsman’s revenge in the folktale—slashing open the wolf to let Red back out—all that much prettier than its cinematic counterparts.) The point is that rural Connecticut (or wherever), like the deep forests of Central Europe, is a place where the rules of civilization do not obtain.”
– Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws
